


Survival

by Marquise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Corruption, F/M, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-28
Updated: 2012-08-28
Packaged: 2017-11-13 01:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marquise/pseuds/Marquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa’s corruption is gradual, and yet inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survival

From The Vale, they watch the kingdom rip itself to shreds.

Harrold had rode off to war at the first sign of fighting, with an eagerness for combat that had turned Sansa’s stomach. But she had held her tongue. She somehow couldn’t bring herself to destroy his innocence. 

She couldn’t tell Randa about her disgust either, not really. Despite the other woman’s worldliness there were some things Sansa was sure she wouldn’t understand. 

She unburdened herself to Petyr. 

In darkened rooms (they were rationing and never had enough wood or candles to fully chase the dark and the cold away), over purloined wine (she would sometimes ask where it came from and Petyr would just shake his head, smiling), she told him all of her fears. 

Deep down, a part of her knew that he was not to be trusted. She was always careful not to show her full hand, not to mention anything about her siblings or the Stark name, not to voice her own suspicions about his motives. She doubted he would be much surprised to learn of her fears and worries, but it pleased her to know that she could hold something from him.

“Would you be upset it Harrold died?” he asks her one evening, rubbing her back in small circles. The wine had done its job—she feels warm and sated, though she knew she could not afford to let her guard down completely. 

_He doesn’t deserve it, but it will happen._ “I’m not with child, it would ruin the plan.”

He smiles with pride, real pride, and for once his smile reaches his eyes. 

And for the first time Sansa dishonors her husband.

She feels different afterwards, walking back to her chambers with her head held high. It’s strange, really—she would have expected to feel soiled, used, a fraud. She knows she should feel all of that, just as she knows she will most likely go to the Sept in the early morning hours and pray for forgiveness, just as she knows she won’t mean any of those prayers. 

At one point in time, she might have. 

But now? In her chambers she strips with shaking hands, but it is excitement that courses though her, not fear or guilt. She had watched Petyr break underneath her, for her pleasure.

She feels intoxicated, and not due to the wine. 

In bed, she pushes aside all of her nagging worries, the fear of his power over her, the knowledge of all the blood on his hands. What had happened _felt_ right, and moreover necessary, and she is not Petyr. Even without meaningful prayers she knows that she can maintain the upper hand, that her soul is not nearly as stained as his and that it never will be. 

_I can control this, I can control him_ she repeats to herself, until she believes it. 

\---

She drinks moon tea for the first time the following morning, and almost instantly retches it back up.

Petyr holds her close and rubs her shoulders. He gives her something to sooth her stomach, before going to prepare the mixture again. The second time, she downs it in one gulp, focusing on the burn, willing it to stay down. It does, and she shares Petyr’s smile.

“It will get easier,” he tells her, and she doesn’t correct his implied assumption.

\---

She hopes for Harrold’s sake that he doesn’t come back. She hates herself for that, but she knows it would be better for all of them if that came to pass. 

Mostly, she doesn’t want to let anything slip that would incriminate her. And she doesn’t want Petyr to get his claws into him. 

But at night, when she allows Petyr to pull her close, when she listens to his heart beat and watches the pulse in his neck, she knows that she doesn’t want him to come home because she doesn’t want to face the reality of whatever this is. She doesn’t really want to acknowledge what she’s done, what she’s become and where she’s headed. 

She cares for Petyr, strangely. She would never call it love, but something about him pulls her in. He’s a damaged man, and his airs and his plots are simply efforts to conceal that, a layer of protection that she sees through because she understands.

At one time, he must have been as innocent as she was prior to King’s Landing. 

_We’re survivors,_ she thinks. _Fighters._ She never really conceived of herself as a fighter, not until Petyr showed her the way to fight with charm and wits. She’s not sure anyone else here really understands what that means; they all seem far too honest.

She can speak to him of songs, and share in his bitter laugh.

\---

The scar is a twisted, hideous thing and yet she can’t seem to keep her hands off it.

She straddles his waist in her bed ( _her_ bed, for he would never let her top anywhere where he had control) and gazes down at it through a curtain of sweat-slicked hair. It’s pink and jagged, stark against his pale flesh. It runs the length of his lean chest, demands attention. He never speaks of it but she knows the history all the same, and laying her hands on it brings back memories of the dead.

She sometimes wonders if her mother had ever seen it, and if that would have changed anything at all.

Sansa runs her fingers up the length of it, taking in the too smooth-skin, watching the way Petyr tries to keep his gaze hard and unfeeling. She can see the vulnerability though, as clear as day. His mouth trembles just slightly, but noticeably, and his eyes lose any trace of artifice. He’s always most undone when he’s under her hands.

It’s attractive, this power. She never wants him more than she does in these moments. 

She brings her hands to rest on his shoulders, lightly, fingers grazing his collarbones. A thousand mocking phrases form and die on her tongue, but even after all that has passed she can’t bring herself to be that cruel.

What they have is a delicate thing, liable to crack apart at a moment’s notice. It will one day—she knows that much—but she’s not sure if she’s willing to lose his support just yet. She still has use of this union, still finds pleasure in the feel of him between her legs. It’s base and filthy, but pleasure is in short supply these days. 

Sansa looks him in the eyes and wonders, not for the first time, how much he really understands her. 

_I have my own scars,_ she thinks, even as he runs his hands over her smooth flesh. The thought almost makes her laugh, even as her throat tightens. 

“Would you ever bleed for me?” she finds herself asking, before she even realizes she is speaking. She hates herself for those words. They betray a weakness, a need for acceptance from him that she is not entirely comfortable with.

Petyr kisses her instead of answering the question. She honestly cannot decide if he would or not, and that sends a chill through her. 

She savors the way he fills her, the ache and the stretch, and finds herself again hoping that Harrold does not return. But this time, it is shame that drives that desire.

\---

So much of their relationship is based on power games, on shows of control and restraint. Sansa almost misses the ease of being with Harry, though she wonders now if she would ever again be comfortable without some degree of deception. If she could even remember what it was like to relax around a man.

Her relationship with Petyr is certainly not the type of relationship she ever pictured for herself as a girl, but that girl is long since dead and all semblance of innocence gone with her. It died when she had looked at her father’s head and was buried when she became Alayne. 

With Petyr by her side she survives, which is something of a miracle. She tells herself sometimes, when she is alone and forced to reflect on what this is, that this survival is why she permits his touch. And there is a degree of truth in that assumption. But that’s not all of it and she can’t completely lie to herself, as much as the truth disgusts her sometimes in the harsh morning light. 

She’s been wanted and desired for most of her life, but she had never before seen a man so _desperate_ for her. She has watched him break under her night after night and it’s hard not to grow attached to that.

 _”I can control him, I can control this,_ has become her nightly prayer. 

 

\---

The war ends and they survive.

When news of Harrold’s death is brought to her she acts the proper widow. She cries, but only in a way that increases her loveliness. She wears black, the color only serving to highlight her porcelain skin. Every man in The Vale falls over himself in an effort to marry her, and she and Petyr have their pick.

Sansa takes her time selecting, weighing her options. She likes watching Petyr get frustrated. She had begun to realize he was not nearly as good at concealing her emotions as she was. _Perhaps,_ she thinks, _it has something to do with being a woman._

She tells herself, when she selects Petyr, that it was her choice all along. 

\---

They go to court together, and she finds to her delight that she no longer trembles when she walks in those halls. 

One night when she is seated at her vanity, removing the powder from her face, she realizes that she no longer recognizes the woman in the mirror.

Her skin is unlined, still beautiful after all she has seen and done. But there is an arch in her brow that was never there before, and the set of her mouth does much to differentiate herself from her late mother. There’s a sharpness to it all that she would not have seen years ago. 

Her hands are still pale and unmarked, despite everything she knows she has soiled herself with to get to this point. 

She thinks of her earlier promises to herself that she could control his influence. She thinks of the horrid Queens in the songs she listened to as a girl, monsters of the spirit if not the flesh.

Sansa looks at herself until she can no longer stand it. When she finally breaks her gaze, violently, she has to struggle to control her sobs.


End file.
